One Health, climate change, and infectious microbes: a joint effort between AGU and ASM to understand impacts of changing climate and microbes on human well-being across scales

the complex relationship among humans, pathogens, animals

human population.For example, waterborne diseases, such as cholera, are common in regions where climatic processes and extremes are associated with social vulnerabilities.Similarly, chikungunya and dengue, both arboviral diseases, present highly non-linear examples of how the geographical reach of a pathogen can expand with climate change in regions where humans are generally naive to these viruses (11).For microbes that cause infectious diseases in human populations, availability of the epidemiological data remains spotty and such data are only sporadically collected in regions where climate extremes intersect with human vulnerabilities.An additional complication is that microbes are quintessentially a part of Earth's ecosystem and therefore most cannot be eradicated since host-vector relationships generally have evolved over time.Therefore, it is essential to quantify pathways in which changing climate will impact both microbes and humans alike.One Health (Fig. 1) provides a useful framework to understand such interactions so that a holistic and pre-emptive understanding of human health and disease threats can be defined.
The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) are collaborating to understand the complexities of a changing climate on infectious microbes and how these changes impact human health and well-being.Both scientific societies seek to understand how our changing climate and weather systems will impact human, animal, and plant health.Increasing climatic variability, including extreme weather events, coupled with human-environmental interactions, lead to increased risk of disease outbreaks, including vector-borne (e.g.Zika, dengue, chikun gunya, malaria, Rift Valley fever), waterborne (e.g., cholera, dysentery, typhoid), and airborne (e.g.coronavirus, influenza) diseases.While the role of geophysical processes is increasingly appreciated as critical to modulation of microbes, the issues of scale discrepancies limit integration of microbiological understanding of pathogens into large-scale climate and weather patterns.A special collection of papers in GeoHealth and mSphere will present accumulated knowledge gathered at the interface of climate, weather, and human health, with emphasis on geophysical processes and microbiolog ical functions, information necessary for early warning systems to be developed that can predict risk of diseases (and emergence of pathogens) under current and future changing climate scenarios.Special emphasis will be given to improving our limited arsenal against respiratory infectious pathogens associated with societal determinants and climate modalities.
To submit a manuscript to GeoHealth, please use the standard submission portal and select the collection title from the drop-down menu in the Special Collection field of the submission form.To submit your manuscript to mSphere, use the standard submission portal and indicate the collection title (One Health, Microbes, and Climate Change) in the cover letter.Queries to the organizers to share your topic proposal and/or abstract prior to submission are encouraged.For presubmission inquiries, please email msphere@asmusa.orgor geohealth@agu.org.

FIG 1
FIG1 The importance of One Health in the globally connected world (image publicly available from www.cdc.gov).
mSphere welcomes submissions on: • Effects of climate change on microbes, microbiomes, microbial community structures, and microbial diversity, particularly in relation to ecosystem health • Effects of microbes on climate change • Effects of climate change on microbial pathogens of humans, animals, and plants • Biogeochemical cycles, nutrient cycling, algal blooms, carbon sequestration, and symbiotic relationships as they relate to climate change GeoHealth welcomes submissions on: • Role of microbes in geophysical processes and climate change in different parts of the globe • Water-, vector-, and airborne diseases related to climate and weather processes • Respiratory infectious pathogens associated with climate modalities • Microbial diversity and impact on Earth-climate models: assimilation of data, use of machine learning and other advanced algorithms